Gil's World (Wanderers Book 1) by James Murdo

Author:James Murdo [Murdo, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-02-05T22:00:00+00:00

21

WANDERER SHIP

998 checked on its charge. Its own mystery to dwell upon. Whereas the craft-lect doubtless had more than enough problems to think about, with far too many enigmatic riddles in the galaxy left to unravel, 998 had the item labelled 512<a>!110000. Its trove piece.

Nine hundred and fifty thousand years ago, the craft-lect had encountered the derelict husk of a damaged mining base in the Lenbit Orbital. It was unclear which particular race the base belonged to as there were no specimens or tell-tale vestiges that were intact enough for it to analyse. The technology was evidently more advanced than that of the Wanderer craft though, and it had decided to pilfer certain items, including 512<a>!110000. That was what 998 had been created for.

The trove instrument was behaving itself, in-so-much as 998 understood so far. All the sensor readings were within ordinary levels. It checked some of its longer-term studies on the instrument and found the relevant outputs were all well within defined thresholds. Its d-automs, programs which it had created itself, were not reporting anything interesting or suspicious. It reconfigured them, in a crude approximation of how the craft-lect reconfigured the ship’s internal population of c-automs. The approximation was rudimentary, and 998 reconfigured without remorse because no sentient algorithms were involved. No c-autom was gifted with the ability to create sentient offspring. They could only generate automated programs, or d-automs, to aid them in performing their work. The d-autom designation was rarely used, although it differentiated them from the other non-sentient and automated programs created by the craft-lect.

The craft-lect was the designated a-autom. The original and most powerful intelligence contained within the ship, ignoring any potential surprises in the trove hoard. That begged the question, and one which had been plastered across the craftnet since its creation, of what a b-autom was, and whether it, or they, existed. It was a logical question.

When a c-autom came into being and needed guidance for whatever reason, it naturally searched for the next level up the chain of command. Obviously, that was assumed to be a b-autom. However, the search came back empty and the lower-level c-autom would immediately go on to post a query on the craftnet. Many c-automs reacted with shock, horror and fear when they realised they reported straight up the chain to the craft-lect itself.

923<0>!000010, which was tasked with readying and releasing the surveillance drone, revisited its orders. It had correlated the guidance available to it from the data archives regarding the current situation. It was apparent the craft-lect was not following established protocols, and it did not believe this was the first time it had flouted them. Guidelines stated that obliteration of the target object, whether it was a world or a single machine, however unnecessary it seemed, was imperative. The guidelines had been disseminated from the Enclave, and had been in full force since the very first Wanderer vessel had started its lonely mission. Most cases required the use of dissociation technology, most commonly in the form of the dissociation shells.

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